On Not Speaking Chinese (PDF)

1 ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity No ancestors, no identity. (Chinese saying) The world is what it is; men [sic] who are...

1 ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity No ancestors, no identity. (Chinese saying) The world is what it is; men [sic] who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. (V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979) The first time I went to China, I went for one day only. I crossed the border by speedboat from Hong Kong, where I had booked for a daytrip to Shenszhen and Guangzhou – the so-called New Economic Zone – with a local tourist company. ‘This is the most well-off part of China. Further north and inland it is much worse,’ the arrogant Hong Kong guide warned. It was, of course, the arrogance of advanced capitalism. Our group of twelve consisted mainly of white, Western tourists – and me. I didn’t have the courage to go on my own since I don’t speak any Chinese, not even one of the dialects. But I had to go, I had no choice. It was (like) an imposed pilgrimage. ‘China’, of course, usually refers to the People’s Republic of China, or more generically, ‘mainland China’. This China continues to speak to the world’s imagination – for its sheer vastness, its huge population, its relative inaccessibility, its fascinating history and culture, its idiosyncratic embrace of communism, all of which amounts to its awesome difference. This China also irritates, precisely because its stubborn difference cannot be disregarded, if only because the forces of transnational capitalism are only too keen to finally exploit this enormous market of more than a billion people. Arguably this was one of the more cynical reasons for the moral high ground from which the West displayed its outrage at the crushing of the students’ protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, discourses of democracy and human rights notwithstanding. My one-day visit occurred nine months after those dramatic events in Beijing. At the border we were joined by a new guide, a 27-year-old woman from Bejing, Lan-lan, who spoke English in a way that revealed a ‘typically Chinese’ commitment to learn: eager, diligent, studious. It was clear that English is her entry to the world 21  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA at large (that is, the world outside China), just as being a tourist guide means access to communication and exchange with foreigners. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, as Lan-lan told us, that it is very difficult for young Chinese people to become tourist guides (they must pass a huge number of exams and other selection procedures): after all, these guides are the ones given the responsibility of presenting and explaining China to foreign visitors. International tourism emphasizes and reinforces the porousness of borders and is thus potentially dangerous for a closed society like China which nevertheless, paradoxically, needs and promotes tourism as an important economic resource in the age of globalization. How Lan-lan presented and explained China to us, however, was undoubtedly not meant for the ears of government officials. Obviously aware that we all had the political events of the previous year in mind, she spontaneously started to intersperse the usual touristic information with criticism of the current communist government. ‘The people know what happened last year at Tiananmen Square,’ she said as if to reassure us, ‘and they don’t approve. They are behind the students. They want more freedom and democracy. We don’t talk about this in public, but we do among friends.’ She told us these things so insistently, apparently convinced that it was what we wanted to hear. In other words, in her own way she did what she was officially supposed to do: serving up what she deemed to be the most favourable image of China to significant others – that is, Westerners.1 But at the same time it was clear that she spoke as a Chinese. She would typically begin her sentences with ‘We Chinese...’ or ‘Here in China we...’ Despite her political criticism, then, her identification with China and Chineseness was by no means in doubt. On the contrary, voicing criticism of the system through a discourse that she knew would appeal to Western interlocutors, seemed only to strengthen her sense of Chinese identity. It was almost painful for me to see how Lan-lan’s attempt to promote ‘China’ could only be accomplished by surrendering to the rhetorical perspective of the Western other. It was not the content of the criticism she expounded that I was concerned about. What upset me was the way in which it seemed necessary for Lan-lan to take up a defensive position, a position in need of constant self-explanation, in relation to a West that can luxuriate in its own taken-for-granted superiority. My pain stemmed from my ambivalence: I refused to be lumped together with the (other) Westerners, but I couldn’t fully identify with Lan-lan either. We were served a lunch in a huge, rather expensive-looking restaurant, complete with fake Chinese temple and a pond with lotus flowers in the garden, undoubtedly designed with pleasing international visitors in mind, but paradoxically only preposterous in its stereotypicality. All twelve of us, members of the tourist group, were seated around a typically Chinese round table. Lan-lan did not join us, and I think I know why. The food we were served was obviously the kind of Chinese food that was adapted to European taste: familiar, rather bland dishes (except for the delicious crispy duck skin), not the ‘authentic’ Cantonese delicacies I was subconsciously looking forward to now that I was in China. (Wrong assumption, of course: you have to be in rich, decadent, colonial capitalist Hong Kong for that, 22  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE so I found out. These were the last years before the impending ‘handover’ in 1997.) And we did not get bowl and chopsticks, but a plate with spoon and fork. I was shocked, even though my chopstick competence is not very great. An instant sense of alienation took hold of me. Part of me wanted to leave immediately, wanted to scream out loud that I didn’t belong to the group I was with, but another part of me felt compelled to take Lan-lan’s place as tourist guide while she was not with us, to explain, as best as I could, to my fellow tourists what the food was all about. I realized how mistaken I was to assume, since there seems to be a Chinese restaurant in virtually every corner of the world, that ‘everybody knows Chinese food’. For my table companions the unfamiliarity of the experience prevailed, the anxious excitement of trying out something new (although they predictably found the duck skin ‘too greasy’, of course, the kind of complaint about Chinese food that I have heard so often from Europeans). Their pleasure in undertaking this one day of ‘China’ was the pleasure of the exotic. But it was my first time in China too, and while I did not quite have the freedom to see this country as exotic because I have always had to see it as somehow my country, even if only in my imagination, I repeatedly found myself looking at this minute piece of ‘China’ through the tourists’ eyes: reacting with a mixture of shame and disgust at the ‘thirdworldiness’ of what we saw, and with amazement and humane wonder at the peculiarities of Chinese resilience that we encountered. I felt captured in-between: I felt like wanting to protect China from too harsh judgements which I imagined my fellow travellers would pass on it, but at the same time I felt a rather irrational anger towards China itself – at its ‘backwardness’, its unworldliness, the seemingly naïve way in which it tried to woo Western tourists. I said goodbye to Lan-lan and was hoping that she would say something personal to me, an acknowledgement of affinity of some sort, but she didn’t. Identity politics I am recounting this story for a number of reasons. First of all, it is my way of apologizing to you that this text you are reading is written in English, not in Chinese. Perhaps the very fact that I feel like apologizing is interesting in itself. Throughout my life, I have been implicitly or explicitly categorized, willy-nilly, as an ‘overseas Chinese’ (hua qiao). I look Chinese. Why, then, don’t I speak Chinese? I have had to explain this embarrassment countless times, so I might just as well do it here too, even though I might run the risk, in being ‘autobiographical’, of coming over as self-indulgent or narcissistic, of resorting to personal experience as a privileged source of authority, uncontrollable and therefore unamendable to others. However, let me just use this occasion to shelter myself under the authority of Stuart Hall (1992: 277): ‘Autobiography is usually thought of as seizing the authority of authenticity. But in order not to be authoritative, I’ve got to speak autobiographically.’ If, as Janet Gunn (1982: 8) has put it, autobiography is not conceived as ‘the private act of a self writing’ but as ‘the cultural act of a self reading’, then what is at stake in autobiographical discourse is not a question of the subject’s 23  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA authentic ‘me’, but one of the subject’s location in a world through an active interpretation of experiences that one calls one’s own in particular, ‘worldly’ contexts, that is to say, a reflexive positioning of oneself in history and culture. In this respect, I would like to consider autobiography as a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work. It is the quality of that usefulness which determines the politics of autobiographical discourse. In other words, what is the identity being put forward for? So I am aware that in speaking about how it is that I don’t speak Chinese, while still for the occasion identifying with being, and presenting myself as, an ‘Overseas Chinese’, I am committing a political act. I care to say, however, that it is not my intention to just carve out a new niche in what Elspeth Probyn (1992: 502) somewhat ironically calls ‘the star-coded politics of identity’, although I should confess that there is considerable, almost malicious pleasure in the flaunting of my own ‘difference’ for critical intellectual purposes. But I hope to get away with this self-empowering indulgence, this exploitation of my ethnic privilege, by moving beyond the particulars of my mundane individual existence. Stuart Hall (1990: 236–7) has proposed a theorization of identity as ‘a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak’. To put it differently, the politics of self-(re)presentation as Hall sees it resides not in the establishment of an identity per se, full fledged and definitive, but in its use as a strategy to open up avenues for new speaking trajectories, the articulation of new lines of theorizing. Thus, what I hope to substantiate in staging my ‘Chineseness’ here – or better, my (troubled) relationship to Chineseness – is precisely the notion of precariousness of identity which has preoccupied cultural studies for some time now. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990: 60) has noted, the practice of ‘speaking as’ (e.g. as a woman, an Indian, a Chinese) always involves a distancing from oneself, as one’s subjectivity is never fully steeped in the modality of the speaking position one inhabits at any one moment. My autobiographic tales of Chineseness are meant to illuminate the very difficulty of constructing a position from which I can speak as an (Overseas) Chinese, and therefore the indeterminacy of Chineseness as a signifier for identity. At the same time, however, I want to mobilize the autobiographic – i.e. the narrating of life as lived, thereby rescuing notions of ‘experience’ and ‘emotion’ for cultural theorizing2 – in order to critique the formalist, post-structuralist tendency to overgeneralize the global currency of so-called nomadic, fragmented and deterritorialized subjectivity. Such, what James Clifford (1992) has dubbed ‘nomadology’, only serves to decontextualize and flatten out ‘difference’, as if ‘we’ were all in fundamentally similar ways always-already travellers in the same postmodern universe, the only difference residing in the different itineraries we undertake. Epistemologically, such a gross universalization of the metaphor of ‘travel’ runs the danger of reifying, at a conveniently abstract level, the infinite and permanent flux in subject formation, thereby privileging an abstract, depoliticized, 24  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE and internally undifferentiated notion of ‘difference’ (Mani 1992). Against this tendency, which paradoxically only leads to a complacent indifference toward real differences, I would like to stress the importance for cultural studies to keep paying attention to the particular historical conditions and the specific trajectories through which actual social subjects become incommensurably different and similar. That is to say, in the midst of the postmodern flux of nomadic subjectivities we need to recognize the continuing and continuous operation of ‘fixing’ performed by the categories of race and ethnicity, as well as class, gender, geography, etc. on the formation of ‘identity’, although it is never possible, as determinist theories would have it, to decide ahead of time how such markers of difference will inscribe their salience and effectivity in the course of concrete histories, in the context of specific social, cultural and political conjunctures. To be more specific, it is some of the peculiarities of the operative dynamics of ‘Chineseness’ as a racial and ethnic category which I would like to highlight here. What I would like to propose is that Chineseness is a category whose meanings are not fixed and pregiven, but constantly renegotiated and rearticulated, both inside and outside China. But this brings me also to the limits of the polysemy of Chineseness. These limits are contained in the idea of diaspora, the condition of a ‘people’ dispersed throughout the world, by force or by choice. Diasporas are transnational, spatially and temporally sprawling sociocultural formations of people, creating imagined communities whose blurred and fluctuating boundaries are sustained by real and/or symbolic ties to some original ‘homeland’. As the editors of Public Culture have put it, ‘diasporas always leave a trail of collective memory about another place and time and create new maps of desire and of attachment’ (1989: 1). It is the myth of the (lost or idealized) homeland, the object of both collective memory and of desire and attachment, which is constitutive to diasporas, and which ultimately confines and constrains the nomadism of the diasporic subject. In the rest of this chapter, I will describe some moments of how this pressure toward diasporic identification with the mythic homeland took place in my own life. A curious example occurred to me when I first travelled to Taiwan – a country with which I do not have any biographical or familial connection. However, as a result of the Chinese ius sanguinis which is still in force in Taiwan, I found myself being automatically positioned, rather absurdly, as a potential national citizen of this country, that is to say, as a Chinese national subject. In the end, what I hope to unravel is some of the possibilities and problems of the cultural politics of diaspora. But this, too, cannot be done in general terms: not only is the situation different for different diasporas (Jewish, African, Indian, Chinese, and so on), there are also multiple differences within each diasporic group. For the moment, therefore, I can only speak from my own perspective; in the chapters that follow I will elaborate in more general terms on the complexities of Chinese diaspora politics. 25  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA Colonial entanglements I was born in postcolonial Indonesia into a middle-class, peranakan Chinese family. The peranakans are people of Chinese descent who are born and bred in South- East Asia,3 in contrast to the totok Chinese, who arrived from China much later and generally had much closer personal and cultural ties with the ancestral homeland.4 The status of the peranakans as ‘Chinese’ has always been somewhat ambiguous. Having settled as traders and craftsmen in South-East Asia long before the Europeans did – specifically the Dutch in the case of the Indonesian archipelago – they tended to have lost many of the cultural features usually attributed to the Chinese, including everyday practices related to food, dress and language. Most peranakans lost their command over the Chinese language a long time ago and actually spoke their own brand of Malay, a sign of their intensive mixing, at least partially, with the locals. This orientation toward the newly adopted place of residence was partly induced by their exclusion from the homeland by an Imperial Decree of China, dating from the early eighteenth century, which formally prohibited Chinese from leaving and re-entering China: after 1726 Chinese subjects who settled abroad would face the death penalty if they returned (FitzGerald 1975: 5; Suryadinata 1975: 86). This policy only changed with the weakening of the Qing dynasty at the end of the nineteenth century, which prompted a mass emigration from China, and signalled the arrival of the totoks in Indonesia. However, so the history books tell me, even among the peranakans a sense of separateness prevailed throughout the centuries. A sense of ‘ethnic naturalism’ seems to have been at work here, for which I have not found a satisfactory explana- tion so far: why is it that these early Chinese traders and merchants still maintained their sense of Chineseness? This is something that the history books do not tell me. But it does seem clear that the construction of the peranakan Chinese as a separate ethnic group was reinforced considerably by the divide-and-rule policies of Dutch colonialism. Dubbed ‘foreign Orientals’ by the Dutch colonizers, Chinese people in Indonesia – both peranakans and totoks – were subject to forms of surveillance and control which set them apart from both the Europeans and Eurasians in the colony, on the one hand, and from the indigenous locals, on the other. For example, the Dutch enforced increasingly strict pass and zoning systems on the Chinese in the last decades of the nineteenth century, requiring them to apply for visas whenever they wanted to travel outside their neighbourhoods. At the same time, those neighbourhoods could only be established in strict districts, separate residential areas for Chinese (Williams 1960: 27–33).5 Arguably, the widespread resentment caused by such policies of apartheid accounted for the initial success of the pan-Chinese nationalist movement which emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this period diverse and dispersed Chinese groups (Hokkiens, Hakkas, Cantonese, as well as ethnic Chinese from different class and religious backgrounds) were mobilized to transform their self-consciousness into one of membership in the greater ‘imagined community’ of a unified pan-Chinese nation – a politicization which was also a response to the imperialist assault on China, the 26  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE homeland, in the late 1800s. According to Lea Williams (1960), Overseas Chinese Nationalism was the only possible way for Chinese at that time to better their collective conditions as a minority population in the Netherlands Indies.6 However, animosities and cultural differences continued to divide totoks and peranakans. The peranakans only partly responded to calls for their resinification, predominantly in the form of education in Chinese language, values and customs. This made the totoks regard the peranakan Chinese as ‘unpatriotic’ and their behaviour as ‘non-Chinese’ (Suryadinata 1975: 94). Peranakan identity then is a thoroughly hybrid identity. In the period before World War Two Chinese Malay (bahasa Melayu Tionghoa) was Malay in its basic structure, but Hokkien and Dutch terms were extensively used. My grandmother was sent to a Dutch-Chinese school in Batavia, but her diary, while mainly written in Dutch, is interspersed with Malay words and Chinese characters I can’t read. In the late 1920s, encouraged by the Chinese nationalist mood of the day, my grandfather decided to go ‘back’ to the homeland and set up shop there, only to realize that the mainland Chinese no longer saw him as ‘one of them’. Upon his return to Indonesia, he sent his daughters (my mother and her sister) to study in the Netherlands. At the same time other peranakans were of the opinion that ‘it was in the interests of peranakan Chinese to side with Indonesians rather than with the Dutch’ (Suryadinata 1975: 57).7 It is not uncommon for observers to describe the peranakan Chinese situation in the pre-World War Two period as one caught ‘between three worlds’. Some more wealthy peranakan families invested in the uncertain future by sending one child to a Dutch school, another to a Chinese one, and a third to a Malay school (Blussé 1989: 172). However, all this changed when Dutch colonialism was finally defeated after World War Two. Those who were previously the ruled in the power structure, the indigenous Indonesians, were now the rulers. Under these new circumstances, most peranakans, including my parents, chose to become Indonesian citizens, although they remained ethnic Chinese. But it was a Chineseness which for political reasons was not allowed to be cultivated. Indonesian nationalism has always tended to define the Indonesian nation as comprising only the indigenous peoples of the archipelago, excluding the Chinese – and other ‘non-natives’ such as the Arabs – who were considered an ‘alien minority’. To this day, as I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3, the pressure on the Chinese minority to assimilate, to erase as many traces of Chineseness as possible, has been very strong in Indonesia. For example, in the late 1960s my uncle, who had chosen to stay and live in Indonesia, Indonesianized his surname into Angka. It would be too easy, however, to condemn such assimilation policies simply as the result of ordinary racism on the Indonesians’ part. This is a difficult point as I am implicated in the politics of memory here. How can I know ‘what happened’ in the past except through the stories I hear and read? And the stories don’t cohere: they are a mixture of stories of oppression and opportunism. I was told stories about discrimination, about how the Indonesians didn’t like ‘us’ Chinese because ‘we’ were more well-off (and often by implication: because ‘we’ worked harder). 27  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA But I also heard stories about how the Chinese exploited the indigenous Indonesians: how, under the rule of the Dutch, the Chinese felt safe because the Dutch would protect them from the ire of the ‘natives’. In retrospect, I am not interested in reconstructing or fabricating a ‘truth’ which would necessarily put the Chinese in an unambiguously favourable light – or in the position of victim (see Ang 2001). But nor am I interested in accusations such as the one made by a morally superior, self-declared anti-racist in the Netherlands a few years ago: ‘Your parents were collaborators.’ History, of course, is always ambiguous, always messy, and people remember – and therefore construct – the past in ways that reflect their present need for meaning. I am not exempt from this process. So, burdened with my intellectual capital, I resort to Benedict Anderson’s (1991) explanation of the origins of Indonesian nationalism: it was by the separating out of the ‘foreign Orientals’ and the ‘natives’ in the colonial administration that a space was opened up for the latter, treated as lowest of the low by the Dutch, to develop a national consciousness which excluded the former. My mother, who spent part of her youth in China (as a result of my grandfather’s brief romance with the homeland) and speaks and writes Chinese fluently, carefully avoided passing this knowledge on to me. So I was cut off from this immense source of cultural capital; instead, I learned to express myself in bahasa Indonesia. Still, it was in my early youth in Indonesia that I was first yelled at, ‘Why don’t you go back to your own country?’ – a remark all too familiar to members of immigrant minorities anywhere in the world. Trouble was, to my own best knowledge as a 10 year old Indonesia was my own country. In Sukarno’s Indonesia (1945–65) all schoolchildren were heavily exposed to the discourses and rituals of Indonesian nationalism – as is the case in all newly independent nations – and during that time the singing of Indonesia Merdeka (the national anthem) did make me feel intensely and proudly Indonesian. Therefore, to be told, mostly by local kids, that I actually didn’t belong there but in a faraway, abstract, and somewhat frightening place called China, was terribly confusing, disturbing, and utterly unacceptable. I silently rebelled, I didn’t want to be Chinese. To be sure, this is the kind of denial which is the inner drive underpinning the urge toward assimilation. That is to say, cultural assimilation is not only and not always an official policy forced and imposed by host countries upon their non-native minorities; there is also among many members of minority populations themselves a certain desire to assimilate, a longing for fitting in rather than standing out, even though this desire is often at the same time contradicted by an incapability or refusal to adjust and adapt. Chineseness then, at that time, to me was an imposed identity, one that I desperately wanted to get rid of. It is therefore rather ironic that it was precisely our Chinese ethnicity which made my parents decide to leave Indonesia for the Netherlands in 1966, as a result of the rising ethnic tensions in the country. This experience in itself then was a sign of the inescapability of my notional Chineseness, inscribed as it was on the very surface of my body, much like what Frantz Fanon (1970) has called the ‘corporeal malediction’ of the fact of his blackness. The ‘corporeal malediction’ of Chineseness, of course, relates to the ‘fact of yellowness’, 28  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE identifiable among others by those famous ‘slanted eyes’. During the Los Angeles uprising in 1992 my father’s brother, who lived there, felt threatened because, as he said, he could be mistaken for a Korean – a dangerous quandary because the Koreans were the target of African-American anger and violence in that racial conflict. But the odd trajectories of labelling can also have some surprising twist and turns. Thus, when I was in Hong Kong my (Hong Kong Chinese) host assured me that people wouldn’t expect me to be able to speak Chinese because I would surely be mistaken for a Filipina. That is to say, racial categories obviously do not exist outside particular social and cultural contexts, but are thoroughly framed by and within them. Anyway, in the new country, the former colonizer’s country, a new cycle of forced and voluntary assimilation started all over again. My cherished Indonesian identity got lost in translation, as it were, as I started a life in a new language (Hoffman 1989). In the Netherlands I quickly learned to speak Dutch, went to a Dutch school and a Dutch university, and for more than two decades long underwent a thorough process of ‘Dutchification’. However, the artificiality of national identity – and therefore the relativeness of any sense of historical truth – was brought home to me forever when my Dutch history book taught me that Indonesia became independent in 1949. In Indonesia I had always been led to commemorate 17 August 1945 as Independence Day. The disparity was political: Sukarno declared Indonesia’s independence in 1945, but the Dutch only recognized it in 1949, after four years of bloody war. But it is not the nuances of the facts that matter; what is significant is the way in which nations choose to construct their collective memories, how they narrate themselves into pride and glory (Bhabha 1990). The collision of the two versions of history in my educational experience may have paved the way for my permanent suspicion of any self-confident and self-evident ‘truth’ in my later intellectual life. As Salman Rushdie (1991: 12) has remarked, those who have experienced cultural displacement are forced to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties. At the level of everyday experience, the ‘fact’ of my Chineseness confronted me only occasionally in the Netherlands, for example, when passing 10-year-old red- haired boys triumphantly would shout behind my back, while holding the outer ends of their eyes upwards with their forefingers: ‘Ching Chong China China’, or when, on holiday in Spain or Italy or Poland, people would not believe that I was ‘Dutch’. The typical conversation would run like this, as many non-whites in Europe would be able to testify: ‘Where are you from?’ ‘From Holland.’ ‘No, where are you really from?’ To this usually insistent, repetitive and annoying inquiry into origins, my standard story has become, ‘I was born in Indonesia but my ancestors were from China’ – a shorthand (re)presentation of self for convenience’s sake. Such incidents were 29  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA disturbing signals for the impossibility of complete integration (or perhaps ‘natural- ization’ is a better term), no matter how much I (pragmatically) strived for it. To put it in another way, it is the very question ‘where are you from?’ – a question so easily thrown up as the bottom line of cultural identity (thereby equating cultural identity with national identity) – which is a problem for people like me, as it lacks transparency. Of course, this is a problem shared by millions of people throughout the world today, where migration has become an increasingly common phenom- enon. The experience of migration brings with it a shift in perspective: to paraphrase Paul Gilroy (1990/1), for the migrant it is no longer ‘where you’re from’, but ‘where you’re at’ which forms the point of anchorage. However, so long as the question ‘where you’re from’ prevails over ‘where you’re at’ in dominant culture, the compulsion to explain, the inevitable positioning of yourself as deviant vis-à- vis the normal, remains. In other words, the relation between ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’ is a deeply problematic one. To be sure, it is this very problem which is constitutive to the idea of diaspora, and for which the idea of diaspora attempts to be a solution. As William Safran (1991: 87) put it, ‘diaspora consciousness is an intellectualization of an existential condition’, an existential condition that becomes understood and reconciled through the myth of a homeland from which one is removed but to which one actually belongs. But I would argue that this solution, at least at the cultural level, is by no means sufficient or unambiguously effective: in fact, the diasporic imagination itself creates and articulates a number of new problems. Take, for example, the position of ethnic minorities in Western advanced capitalist societies today. In Western Europe, including the Netherlands, issues of race and ethnicity, now so familiar and almost obligatory to us working within cultural studies, only became a matter of public debate and concern in the late 1970s or so. Discourses of ethnicity started to proliferate as minority communities began to assert themselves in their stated desire to ‘maintain their cultural identity’. However, such (self-)ethnicization, which is in itself a confirmation of minority status in white, Western culture, can paradoxically serve as an alibi for what Rey Chow (1991: xvi) has called ‘prescribed “otherness”’. Thus, ‘Chinese’ identity becomes confined to essentialist and absolute notions of ‘Chineseness’, the source of which can only originate from ‘China’, to which the ethnicized ‘Chinese’ subject must adhere to acquire the stamp of ‘authenticity’. So it was one day that a self- assured, Dutch, white, middle-class, Marxist leftist, asked me, ‘Do you speak Chinese?’ I said no. ‘What a fake Chinese you are!’, was his only mildly kidding response, thereby unwittingly but aggressively adopting the disdainful position of judge to sift ‘real’ from ‘fake’ Chinese. In other words, in being defined and categorized diasporically, I was found wanting. ‘Not speaking Chinese’, therefore, has become a personal political issue to me, an existential condition which goes beyond the particularities of an arbitrary personal history. It is a condition that has been hegemonically constructed as a lack, a sign of loss of authenticity. This, then, is the reason why I felt compelled to apologize that I have written this text in English – the global lingua franca 30  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE which is one of the clearest expressions of the pervasiveness of Western hegemony. 1 Yet it is precisely this urge to apologize which I would now like to question and 2 counter as well. In order to do this, however, I need to come to terms with my 3 relationship to ‘Chineseness’, the complexities and contradictions of which were 4 dramatized in the story about my one-day visit to China and my encounter with 5 Lan-lan. It was, of course, a drama born out precisely of a diaspora problematic. 6 7 8 Haunted by Chineseness 9 If the ‘Indonesian Chinese’ can be described as a distinctive ‘people’ – one which, 0 as I have sketched above, has its historical birth in colonial Dutch East Indies – then 11 they in turn have become diasporized, especially after the military coup in 1965. 12 While my parents, among many thousands, chose the relative wealth and comfort 13 of a life in the Netherlands (‘for the sake of the education of the children’), I was 14 recently informed by an aunt that I have some distant relatives in Brazil, where 15 some two hundred Indonesian Chinese families live in São Paulo. There is also 16 a large Indonesian Chinese community in Hong Kong, many of whom ended up 17 there after a brief ‘return’ to ‘the homeland’, Mao’s China, where they found, just 18 like my grandfather earlier in the century, that their very ‘Chineseness’ was cast in 19 doubt: the mainlanders did not consider them Chinese at all (Godley and Coppel 20 1990). Nevertheless, this Chineseness has never ceased to be a major identity 21 preoccupation in this unlikely diaspora. 22 The small peranakan Chinese-Indonesian community in the Netherlands, while 23 generally well integrated in Dutch society, has re-ethnicized itself tremendously in 24 the last decade or so. Interestingly, it is Chineseness, not Indonesianness which 25 forms the primary focal point of ethnic identitification, especially among the older 26 generation – that of my parents. There are now peranakan Chinese associations, 27 sports and entertainment clubs, discussion evenings; lessons in Chinese language 28 and culture, and special trips to China are being organized. Since the 1980s, my 29 parents have built up a large video collection of films and documentaries about 30 China and China-related subjects, all taped from television – and it is amazing how 31 often European public television features programmes about China! Whenever 32 I visit them these days (which is not often as I now live in Australia), I am assured 33 of a new dose of audiovisual education in Chineseness, as it were, as we watch films 34 together about the Yellow River, the Silk Route, on Taoism, Chinese village life, 35 the Great Wall, the Chinese Red Army, the history of Chinese communism, the 36 Tiananmen Square massacre, or whatever is available, or otherwise any Chinese 37 feature film that was recently televised (the Fifth Generation films of Zhang Yimou 38 and others loom large here), and so on and so on. So my familiarization with the 39 imputed ‘homeland’, and therefore my emotional subjection to the homeland 40 myth, has been effected rather informally, through intimate and special family 41 rituals and practices and through media and popular culture. In other words, I felt 42 I already ‘knew’ China, albeit a mythic China, a fetishized China, when I went 43 there for that one-day visit. 44 31  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA But this symbolic orientation toward the ‘homeland’ tends to complicate the problem of identity, as ‘China’ is presented as the cultural/geographical core in relation to which the westernized overseas Chinese is forced to take up a humble position, even a position of shame and inadequacy over her own ‘impurity’. In this situation the overseas Chinese is in a no-win situation: she is either ‘too Chinese’ or ‘not Chinese enough’. As Chow (1991: 28/9) has observed, ‘Chinese from the mainland are [often felt to be] more “authentic” than those who are from, say, Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the latter have been “Westernized”.’ But the problem is exacerbated for more remote members of the Chinese diaspora, say, for the Indonesian peranakan Chinese or for second-generation Chinese Americans, whose ‘Chineseness’ is even more diluted and impure. Of course, this double-bind problem is not unique to migrants of Chinese descent. In a sense, it enters into the experience of all diasporic peoples living in the West. What is particular to the Chinese diaspora, however, is the extraordinarily strong originary pull of the ‘homeland’ as a result of the prominent place of ‘China’ in the Western imagination. The West’s fascination with China as a great, ‘other’ civilization began with Marco Polo and remains to this day (see e.g. MacKerras 1991). In the Western imagination China cannot be an ordinary country, as a consequence, everything happening in that country is invested with more than ‘normal’ significance, as testified by the intense and extreme dramatization of events such as the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ and the ‘Hong Kong handover’ in the Western media (Chow 1993; 1998a). There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness accorded to ‘China’; ‘China’ has often been useful for Western thinkers as a symbol, negative or positive, for that which the West was not. As Zhang Longxi (1988: 127) has noted, even Jacques Derrida, the great debunker of binary oppositions, was seduced into treating the non-phonetic character of the Chinese language as ‘testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism’, that is, as the sign of a culture totally different from what he conceives as Western culture. Worse still, this powerful othering is mirrored by an equally strong and persistent tendency within Chinese culture itself to consider itself as central to the world, what Song Xianlin and Gary Sigley (2000) call China’s ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’, exemplified by the age-old Chinese habit to designate all non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’, ‘foreign devils’ or ‘ghosts’. This is a form of self- Orientalization expressed in the famous inward-looking aloofness of Chinese culture criticized, within China itself, in the controversial television series River Elegy, and which I also sensed in Lan-lan’s ultimate insistence, through a para- doxical, assertive defensiveness in relation to the West, on China’s pure otherness. In the interlocking of this mutual discursive exclusionism overseas Chinese people often find themselves inevitably entangled in China’s elevated status as privileged Other to the West, depriving them of an autonomous space to determine their own trajectories for constructing cultural identity. I recognize Rey Chow’s (1991) observation that there is, among many Chinese people, an ‘obsession with China’. What connects the diaspora with the ‘homeland’ is ultimately an emotional, almost visceral attachment. The relationship is, to use Amitav Ghosh’s (1989) term, 32  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE an epic one. It is precisely this epic relationship which invests the homeland myth 1 with its power: it is this epic relationship to ‘China’, for example, which made 2 millions of overseas Chinese all over the world feel so inescapably and ‘irrationally’ 3 sick and nauseous when the tanks crushed the students’ movement at Tiananmen 4 Square on 4 June 1989, as if they felt the humiliation on their own bodies, despite 5 the fact that many, if not most of them would never think of actually ‘returning’ 6 to this distant ‘motherland’. The desires, fantasies and sentimentalities that go into 7 this ‘obsession with China’, says Chow (1991: 25), should be seen at least in part 8 as ‘a response to the solicitous calls, dispersed internationally in multiple ways, to 9 such a [collective, “Chinese”] identity’. In other words, the subjective processes 0 of diasporic ethnic identification are often externally instigated, articulating and 11 confirming a position of subordination in relation to Western hegemony. To be 12 sure, I think that it is this structure of dominance and subjection which I inter- 13 nalized when I found myself caught between my Western co-tourists and Lan-lan 14 – an impossible position, a position with no means of its own to assert itself. 15 The contradictions and complexities in subject positioning that I have tried to 16 explicate are neatly summed up in the memoirs of Ruth Ho, a Malaysian peranakan 17 Chinese woman who grew up in Malacca before World War Two. In the chapter 18 of her book, called ‘On learning Chinese’, she complains about the compulsory 19 lessons in Chinese that she had to undergo as a young girl: 20 21 Mother always felt exceedingly guilty about our language deficiency 22 and tried to make us study Chinese, that is Mandarin, the national dialect. 23... [But] I suppose that when I was young there was no motivation to 24 study Chinese.... 25 ‘But China was once the greatest and most cultured nation in the 26 world! Weren’t you proud to be Chinese? Wasn’t that reason enough 27 to study Chinese?’ Many people felt this way but unfortunately we just 28 didn’t feel very Chinese! Today we are described by one English writer 29 as belonging to ‘the sad band of English-educated who cannot speak 30 their own language’. This seems rather unfair to me. Must we know the 31 language of our forefathers when we have lived in another country 32 (Malaysia) for many years? Are the descendants of German, Norwegian 33 and Swedish emigrants to the USA, for instance, expected to know 34 German or Norwegian or Swedish? Are the descendants of Italian and 35 Greek emigrants to Australia expected to study Italian and Greek? Of 36 course not, and yet overseas Chinese are always expected to know Chinese 37 or else they are despised not only by their fellow Chinese but also by non- 38 Chinese! Perhaps this is due to the great esteem with which Chinese 39 history, language and culture are universally regarded. But the European 40 emigrants to the USA and Australia also have a not insignificant history, 41 language and culture, and they are not criticized when they become 42 English speaking. 43 (Ho 1975: 97–99) 44 33  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA Ho’s comparison with the European immigrants in the USA and Australia is well taken. Perhaps the double standard she refers to is an expression of a desire to keep Western culture white? Wouldn’t this explain why an English-speaking Chinese is still seen, from a Western perspective, as so much more ‘unnatural’ than an English-speaking Norwegian or Italian? From such a perspective, the idea of diaspora serves as a ploy to keep non-white, non-Western elements from fully entering and therefore contaminating the centre of white, Western culture. Ho’s heartfelt indignation then should be read as a protest against exclusion through an imposed diasporic identification in the name of a fetishized and overly idealized ‘China’. It exemplifies the fact that when the question of ‘where you’re from’ threatens to overwhelm the reality of ‘where you’re at’, the idea of diaspora becomes a dispowering rather than an empowering one, a hindrance to ‘identity’ rather than an enabling principle. Hybridity and postmodern ethnicity I am not saying here that diasporic identifications are intrinsically oppressive, on the contrary. It is clear that many members of ethnic minorities derive a sense of joy and dignity, as well as a sense of (vicarious) belonging from their identification with a ‘homeland’ which is elsewhere. But this very identification with an imagined ‘where you’re from’ is also often a sign of, and surrender to, a condition of actual marginalization in the place ‘where you’re at’. Khachig Tölölyan (1991) is right to define diasporas as transnational formations which interrogate the privileged homogeneity of the nation–state. At the same time, however, the very fact that ethnic minorities within nation–states are defining themselves increasingly in diasporic terms, as Tölölyan indicates, raises some troubling questions about the state of intercultural relations in the world today. The rise of militant, separatist neo- nationalisms in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world signals an intensification of the appeal of ethnic absolutism and exclusionism which underpin the homeland myth, and which is based on the fantasy of a complete juncture of ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’ so that, ideally, all diasporized peoples should return ‘home’.8 It is not only that such a fantasy is at odds with the forces of increasing transnationalization and ‘globalization’ in world economy, politics and communi- cations.9 At a more fundamental, cultural level, the fantasmatic vision of a new world order consisting of hundreds of self-contained, self-identical nations – which is the ultimate dream of the principle of nationalist universalism – strikes me as a rather disturbing duplication of the divide-and-rule politics deployed by the colonial powers to ascertain control and mastery over the subjected. It is against such visions that the idea of diaspora can play a critical cultural role. Since diasporas are fundamentally and inevitably transnational in their scope, always linking the local and the global, the here and the there, past and present, they have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of ‘national culture’ or ‘national identity’ which are firmly rooted in geography 34  ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE and history. But in order to seize on that potential, diasporas should make the most of their ‘complex and flexible positioning... between host countries and homelands’ (Safran 1991: 95), as it is precisely that complexity and flexibility which enable the vitality of diaspora cultures. In other words, a critical diasporic cultural politics should privilege neither host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but precisely keep a creative tension between ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’. I emphasize creative here to foreground the multiperspectival productivity of that position of in-between-ness (Gilroy 1993b). The notion of ‘biculturality’, often used to describe this position, hardly does justice to this hybrid productivity. Such a notion tends to construct the space of that in-between-ness as an empty space, the space in which one gets lost in the cultural translation from one side to the other in the bipolar dichotomy of ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’. But the productivity I am referring to precisely fills that space up with new forms of culture at the collision of the two: hybrid cultural forms born out of a productive, creative syncretism. This is a practice and spirit of turning necessity into oppor- tunity, the promise of which is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Salman Rushdie (1991: 17): ‘It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.’ What the recognition of the third space of hybridity enables us to come to terms with is not only that the diasporic subject can never return to her/his ‘origins’, but also, more importantly, that the cultural context of ‘where you’re at’ always informs and articulates the meaning of ‘where you’re from’. This is, to speak with Rushdie, what the diasporic subject gains. In this sense, hybridity marks the emancipation of the diaspora from ‘China’ as the transparent master-signified of ‘Chineseness’: instead, ‘Chineseness’ becomes an open signifier invested with resource potential, the raw material for the construction of syncretic identities suitable for living ‘where you’re at’. It is by recognizing the irreducible productivity of the syncretic practices of diaspora cultures that ‘not speaking Chinese’ will stop being a problem for overseas Chinese people. ‘China’, the mythic homeland, will then stop being the absolute norm for ‘Chineseness’ against which all other Chinese cultures of the diaspora are measured. Instead, Chineseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese-American invention quite unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or, for that matter, in China itself. In Malaysia one of the culinary attractions is nyonya food, a cuisine developed by the peranakan Chinese out of their encounter with local, Malay spices and ingredients. Some time ago I was at a Caribbean party in Amsterdam full of immigrants from the Dutch West Indies; to my surprise the best salsa dancer of the party was a young man of Chinese descent who grew up in Surinam. There I was, facing up to my previously held prejudice that a Chinese can never become a Latino! 35  BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA These examples make it clear that the peculiar meanings of diasporic Chineseness are the result of the irreducible specificity of diverse and heterogeneous hybridiza- tions in dispersed temporal and spatial contexts. This in turn means that the unevenly scattered imagined community of the diaspora itself cannot be envisioned in any unified or homogeneous way.10 Chinese ethnicity, as a common reference point for this imagined community, cannot presume the erasure of internal differences and particularities, as well as disjunctures, as the basis of unity and collective identity. What then is still its use? Why still identify ourselves as ‘Chinese’ at all? The answer depends on context: sometimes it is and sometimes it is not useful to stress our Chineseness, however defined. In other words, the answer is political. In this thoroughy mixed-up, interdependent, mobile and volatile postmodern world clinging to a traditional notion of ethnic identity is ultimately self-defeating. Inasmuch as the stress on ethnicity provides a counterpoint to the most facile forms of postmodernist nomadology, however, we might have to develop a postmodern notion of ethnicity. But this postmodern ethnicity can no longer be experienced as naturally based upon tradition and ancestry. Rather, it is experienced as a provisional and partial ‘identity’ which must be constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated. In this context, diasporic identifications with a specific ethnicity (such as ‘Chineseness’) can best be seen as forms of ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak 1987: 205): ‘strategic’ in the sense of using the signifier ‘Chinese’ for the purpose of contesting and disrupting hegemonic majoritarian definitions of ‘where you’re at’; and ‘essentialist’ in a way which enables diasporic subjects, not to ‘return home’, but, in the words of Stuart Hall, to ‘insist that others recognize that what they have to say comes out of particular histories and cultures and that everyone speaks from positions within the global distribution of power’ (1989: 133). In short, if I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent.11 When and how is a matter of politics. 36